Circle of poison - Pesticides and People in a Hungry World (Food First, 1981)

(introduction...)

Acknowledgments

Preface

Chapter one - The circle of poison

Chapter two - A victim every minute

Chapter three - Dumping: Business as usual

Chapter four - The pesticide boomerang

Chapter five - Pesticides to feed the hungry ?

Chapter six - The global pesticides super-market

Chapter seven - Lubricating the sales machine

Chapter eight - With the advice and consent of government

Chapter nine - Breaking the circle of poison

Bureaucracy glossary

Appendix A

Appendix B

Appendix C

For more information

About the institute

Chapter three - Dumping: Business as usual

THE INTERNATIONAL TRADE in pesticides is an ever changing affair. In the ebb
and flow of commerce, buyers, sellers and products change constantly. To
illustrate how hazardous pesticides find their way overseas, we have selected
the example of DBCP, which provides a fascinating and well-documented case study
of the problem.

Until recently, once or twice every working day a sealed
semi-trailer drove through a grimy industrial section of the Los Angeles basin
called City of Commerce. The truck moved slowly up Pacific Street past a row of
dingy warehouses to a loading dock at the rear of Amvac Chemical Corporation's
pesticide plant. There, from a storage area labeled "Restricted Area/Authorized
personnel only beyond this point," light blue, 30-gallon drums stacked three
high were loaded into the semi-trailer.

When it was filled, the rig headed for one of the interstate
highways cries-crossing the area, and moved into the stream of traffic flowing
back and forth across the country. The driver carried emergency telephone
numbers and special instructions in case the colorless, odorless fluid in the
drums somehow spilled or was released. No unloading or transfer of the toxic
cargo was permitted en route to the shipping docks, where the chemical would be
sent overseas.

The pesticide in the light blue drums was
1,2-Dibromo-3-chloropropane, or DBCP. DBCP is a nematocide, effective against
the small worms called nematodes which attack food plants such as pineapples,
bananas and citrus fruits.

Many of the trucks carrying Amvac's DBCP were bound for the
Gulfport, Mississippi, loading docks of Standard Fruit & Steamship Company,
a subsidiary of Castle & Cooke. At Gulfport, the light blue drums were
loaded onto a "banana ship," destined for Puerto Limón in Costa Rica, La Ceiba
in Honduras, or Guayaquil in Ecuador.

DBCP bananas for U.S. tables

AFTER FOUR TO SEVEN days at sea, the banana ship docked and the
pesticide drums were unloaded and taken to their ultimate stop - the vast banana
and pineapple plantations of Castle & Cooke. Castle & Cooke is one of
the largest foreign corporate landholders in Central America. Workers on the
company plantations, mostly illiterate peasants, used this pesticide to kill
soil-dwelling worms that attack bananas. Then virtually all the bananas were
shipped to U.S. tables.

Castle & Cooke stopped importing DBCP from Amvac in late 1979
when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued an emergency suspension of
all uses of DBCP (except on Hawaiian pineapples) because DBCP is believed to
cause cancer and make humans sterile.

"Castle & Cooke decided to stop importing DBCP from us
directly," an Amvac marketing official explained. "Their policy is 'let's not
cause any furor - we will get the stuff through local importers down there.' Now
we have to contact the people who import it for them in Central America. Castle
& Cooke won't buy it directly anymore, but they encourage their plantation
managers to buy it from local importers down there."

Castle & Cooke, however, maintains that it stopped purchasing
and using DBCP, directly or indirectly, immediately following the EPA ban.
According to Leonard Marks, Jr., executive vice president of the company, "It is
Castle & Cooke's corporate policy that we will not use nor purchase product
treated with any pesticide which is not specifically registered for that use by
the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency."

Amvac, however, according to the marketing official, continued to
sell DBCP after the ban "anywhere in the world where bananas, pineapples,
citrus, and cotton are grown. There's no problem with the ban of DBCP (within
the United States)," he said. "In fact, it was the best thing that could have
happened for us. You can't sell it here anymore but you can still sell it
anywhere else. Our big market has always been exports anyway."

Where giants fear to tread

RECENTLY, Amvac apparently suspended production of DBCP. For
several years, however, it was the only company anywhere producing the
substance.

When workers at Occidental's DBCP plant in California discovered
in 1977 that many of them were sterile, the State of California banned the use
of DBCP outright - an action that the federal Environmental Protection Agency
waited two more years to take. Occidental, Dow and Shell quickly ceased their
production. But little Amvac rushed in to seize the profit opportunities
suddenly abandoned by the giants.

The company candidly explained its motives in its "10-K," an
annual report required by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission:
"Management believes that because of the extensive publicity and notoriety that
has arisen over the sterility of workers and the suspected mutagenic and
carcinogenic nature of DBCP, the principal manufacturers and distributors of the
product (Dow, Occidental, and Shell Chemical) have, temporarily at least,
decided to remove themselves from the domestic marketplace and possibly from the
world marketplace," the report states.

"Notwithstanding all the publicity and notoriety surrounding
DBCP," Amvac's report continues, it was {our}opinion that a vacuum existed in
the marketplace that {we}could temporarily occupy... [we] further believed that
with the addition of DBCP, sales might be sufficient to reach a profitable
level."

A former Amvac executive told us why company officials decided to
produce DBCP. "They're not really for spreading cancer or 'no-population' growth
{a reference to the chemical's sterility link}. But DBCP is very important to
them," he explained. "Quite frankly, without DBCP, Amvac would go bankrupt."

Before moving into the DBCP business, Amvac was in bad shape. In
late 1978, one of its two principal stockholders, MTM Enterprises (controlled by
Mary Tyler Moore and her former husband, and which produces the popular
television show Lou Grant), decided to divest itself of its 12 percent portion
of Amvac's common shares. Amvac faced imminent collapse until its major
creditors formed a lenient repayment schedule, and even then the company missed
its debt payments several times. DBCP offered Amvac a way out of the financial
doldrums; the company chose to take it.

Amvac's yearly sales of roughly $10 million may be dwarfed by the
multi-billion-dollar behemoths of the pesticide industry, but Amvac was not
alone in profiting from pesticide dumping. In fact, it shares its profits with
Dow, which received a three percent royalty on all DBCP sold by Amvac under a
patenting agreement. Thus, even though Dow no longer made DBCP it still profited
via the interlocking financial arrangements that link the small companies to the
large, giving all a share in the global pesticide business.

Velsicol's pesticide shell game

THE STORY OF the pesticide Phosvel - and the "Phosvel Zombies" it
created - is a chilling example of the cruel shell game the multinational
companies can play as they move their poisons from one country to the next,
trying to maximize sales before their pesticides are banned again.

Phosvel, the exclusive brand name for an organophosphate nerve
toxin called leptophos, was marketed by Velsicol Chemical Corporation, a
division of the mammoth Northwest Industries, which distributes everything from
Cutty Sark Scotch whisky to Fruit of the Loom underwear.

The dangers of Phosvel became public in 1976, when the U.S.
Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) revealed that workers at
Velsicol's Bayport, Texas, plant had developed serious disorders of the central
nervous system. Fellow workers dubbed them "Phosvel Zombies" because they lost
their coordination, and their ability to work, talk and think clearly. The
workers sued Velsicol, and the company closed the plant.

But even after all the publicity generated by the Phosvel Zombie
scandal (including charges by U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy that the company
knowingly continued to make Phosvel even after its employees became ill),
Velsicol kept selling the pesticide overseas.

Velsicol's marketing of Phosvel shows that even when third world
countries join the United States in banning especially dangerous pesticides, the
multinational giants who control the global pesticide supermarket can often
continue to sell dangerous chemicals for years.

Although more than four years have passed since Phosvel's dangers
burst into the headlines, there is disturbing evidence that it is still on the
market.

The EPA never allowed Velsicol to sell Phosvel in the United
States, although it did routinely issue a one-year experimental use permit.
Velsicol used this permit to its advantage in Colombia. When the Colombian
Committee for Environmental Information began campaigning against the
pesticide's disabling side-effects, Velsicol first threatened to sue, then
produced its experimental use permit as "proof" that Phosvel had been registered
for use in the United States for eight years.

Meanwhile, with $4 million in AID funds, 13.9 million pounds of
Phosvel and other banned pesticides were shipped to 50 countries as part of the
U.S. foreign aid program from 1971 to 1976. (This practice was eventually
stopped by a lawsuit brought by environmental groups. ) In Egypt, a widely
publicized Phosvel epidemic in 1971 killed over 1,000 water buffalo and an
unknown number of peasants. The victims suffered a slow and agonizing death,
gradually paralyzed until they asphyxiated.

Velsicol beats the Phosvel ban

ALTHOUGH VELSICOL says it no longer manufactures Phosvel anywhere
in the world, documents show that during 1978 - two years after the notorious
Phosvel Zombie publicity - Velsicol imported Phosvel into Costa Rica via three
shipments originating in Panama and Mexico. In addition, according to the
government of Indonesia, large quantities of Phosvel are still being sold there.

In Colombia, authorities banned Phosvel in July 1977. Velsicol
simply moved its stockpiles of Phosvel to a free trade zone, technically out of
Colombian jurisdiction, and then shipped it to nearby countries where it was not
yet banned.

Attempts by the company to peddle Phosvel elsewhere, however, met
with resistance.

After the Philippines banned Phosvel, according to that country's
Pesticide Technical Services Chief Ricardo Deang, "Velsicol came to us and said,
'We want to export our stocks of Phosvel to Thailand.' But we couldn't let them
do that to our sister country. So I said, 'You have to prove to us that Thailand
really wants this stuff. Otherwise you must send it back to the States for
disposal.' So then they ended up shipping it all back to the U.S."

Guatemalan official Fernando Mazariegos remembers, "After the
Phosvel scandal in the U.S., Velsicol came to us and said they wanted to study
the possibilities for its use in Central America. We turned that request down. I
think their purpose was to stare selling a lot of it in Central America and in
other countries."

Company spokesman Richard Blewitt says Velsicol did not try to
mislead officials in Colombia, the Philippines, or Guatemala about Phosvel. But
he does admit that "what happened happened. We're trying {to}make sure that
{it}never happens again. A new team has been amassed {at Velsicol}."

Phosvel is not Velsicol's only hazardous pesticide. Once Phosvel
was removed from the market, at least officially, Velsicol began manufacturing
EPN as a substitute. But EPN - now under EPA review - is believed to be twice as
neurotoxic as Phosvel. Velsicol also manufactures ingredients for three
essentially banned organochlorines - heptachlor, chlordane and endrin - at a
plant in Chicago, and formulates the finished products in Memphis. Most of the
production is for the overseas market, since endrin use is severely restricted
in the U.S., and heptachlor and chlordane are completely banned for agricultural
purposes inside the continental U.S. (Like DBCP, endrin may be used on
pineapples in Hawaii until the end of 1982 - which testifies less to the need
for either pesticide on pineapples than to the political clout of the Hawaiian
Pineapple Growers' Association, dominated by Del Monte and Castle & Cooke.)

Hooker: the Love Canal dumper

THE HOOKER Chemical and Plastic Corporation - in-famous for the
Love Canal tragedy - is another pesticide dumper. Hooker is a wholly-owned
subsidiary of Occidental - one of the three major firms which ceased DBCP
production when workers at its California plant discovered they were sterile.

At the Love Canal near Niagara Falls, New York, thousands of
pounds of lethal chemical wastes at an abandoned Hooker chemical dumpsite
percolated to the surface 20 years later. This tragedy is still being felt in
the residential neighborhood today, four years since the site was rediscovered
in 1976. An unusually large number of children are born with birth defects,
adults and children are suffering from high rates of chemically-induced
diseases, and a whole way of life has been disrupted as people have been forced
to sell their homes to escape the leeching poisons. The Love Canal tragedy was a
turning point in the growing movement of people fighting against the invasion of
toxic chemicals.

In the third world, Hooker's marketing of pesticides may
eventually cause similar tragedies. But third world peasants usually do not have
access to information about Hooker's toxic products and practices, and probably
will not know what has affected them. In addition, most of them cannot simply
move away like many Love Canal residents have done.

One example of Hooker's third world marketing practices occurred
in 1976. Hooker voluntarily withdrew its EPA registration of the organochlorine
BHC, after feeding tests with mice showed it causes tumors, kills fetuses and
causes premature births, and has other dangerous reproductive effects even when
absorbed in tiny concentrations. But when it withdrew BHC from the U.S. market,
Hooker explicitly stated that it would continue producing the chemical for use
overseas.

In recent years, records indicate, Ortho has imported BHC into
Costa Rica, the German firm Schering imported BHC into Colombia, and, according
to U.S. Department of Agriculture cables, BHC was used on coffee grown for U.S.
consumption in Peru and
Guatemala.